Scenes from Linzergasse
by Gabi-hime
Summary: Himuro Reiichi x Heroine - Things that seem very difficult are often actually very easy.


**Scenes ****from ****Linzergasse**

_Tokimeki __Memorial __Girl__'__s __Side __First __Love_

_Himuro __Reiichi __x __Heroine_

_**By **__**Gabihime **__**at **__**gmail **__**dot **__**com**_

**Author****'****s ****Note****: **This story has sex in it. You have been forewarned.

_Scenes __from __Linzergasse_ happens in the autumn after Yumeno Midori's graduation from Habataki Gakuen and Himuro Reiichi's confession and deliriously awkward marriage proposal. She is attending the Mozarteum University Salzburg and he has followed her to Salzburg - obtaining a leave of absence from the affable Amanohashi - ostensibly as her chaperone. They live together in a small apartment over a shop on Linzergasse.

Himuro tutors small Austrian children in mathematics and gives piano lessons from their apartment, plays jazz piano at a club some weeknights, and generally loafs around with no formal employment, while Midori is deeply embroiled in her studies.

At the university, Midori has come in contact with an old classmate from her time in Italy, who is very honest about his intentions to pursue her.

You all asked for it.

Here it is, at last.

* * *

They didn't speak on the walk home. He had helped her into her wrap at the conservatory, and then given her his arm. The heavy glance that Himuro had given her dark-haired classmate at that moment had been cool and unblinking, the line of his mouth as hard as unweathered basalt.

He said, _Do __not __begin __to __imagine __that __I __will __let __you __any __closer __than __you __are __now__._

If Ettore Gatti was threatened by this silent declaration, he gave no indication, simply stood in the beautifully carved doorway and kept his eyes on Midori.

The lamps in the marble entry hall had flickered on, unnoticed, the music from the reception providing a wandering backdrop - it was Debussy's Reverie, likely played by Lisette Deniaud - and no one said anything.

The night was still young and busy, but a mist of rain hung over the city, not quite willing to coalesce into drops and fall properly. It beaded in the hair that framed Midori's face, and collected in micodroplets along the edge of the silk scarf she wore tied around her head.

Himuro found himself both troubled and angry. He was angry that his stubborn commitment to "letting things develop as they would" had let this situation progress so far. He was angry at himself for not asking Midori about the mild unease he had noticed in her for the past several weeks, angry that his inaction had forced her into an uncomfortable position.

She had not complained. Of course she had not complained. She rarely complained about anything, and she was more used to his inaction, to his desperate and feeble attachment to the status quo, than she was to his calm, rational decision.

She was always giving him space, giving him all the space he demanded, no matter what it cost her.

He had put a ring on her finger, had secured her promise to marry him, and yet he still persisted in introducing himself as her chaperone as opposed to her fiance, forbade her from setting foot inside his bedroom, demanded that she wear only very sensible pajamas, and keep to the very strict schedule of usage posted on their shared bathroom door.

All of these things were maginot lines he had created for himself: long, rambling walls he had constructed for no one's benefit but his own, no matter what officious justifications he might repeat to himself as if he were saying the rosary.

And ultimately, he had known it the entire time.

She studied very hard, practiced endlessly, and tried her best to keep on the lawful side of all the rules he was creating to divide their shared living space. She made him breakfast, lunch, and dinner, left sweet, short notes for him on her most busy days, and struggled to accept the fact that the most physical affection he was willing to allow was a chaste kiss on the forehead before she collapsed into exhausted sleep.

Midori was doing her best, as she always did, but the strain was beginning to tell on her.

It had been telling on him for months, which is why he continued to invent absurd rules for their cohabitation, attempting to keep her as far away from him as possible. He had no real reason for doing so. Her parents had already happily turned her over into his care, and his own parents had been elated when he had quietly announced their engagement. She herself had been terrifyingly willing from the first moment he had met her, although it had taken some time for him to recognize this worrying fact.

The simple truth was _he __had __been __pushing __her __away __from __him __for __so __long __that __he __had __no __idea __how __to __go __about __doing __anything __different__._

Well, that wasn't strictly true.

He actually had quite a few ideas about what he might do differently, but they were all disconnected and jumbled, things that seemed like the mystifying end results of a long logical proof that he did not know how to begin. Although he was well-acquainted with the abstract concepts of sexual experience and mutual gratification, he had no idea how to initiate a sequence of events that might culminate in such an outcome.

He had no experience with women, and even he could recognize that the tenderness he was so unwilling to express was awkward at best, since he so rarely expressed it. It always erupted in blinding bursts of haphazard emotion when he could no longer suppress it.

It was not elegant. It was not romantic. It was not beautiful to a mind that loved clarity, and spare, clean expressions of meaning.

And he wanted it to be. She had become the only thing in his life that really mattered to him. Himuro no longer attempted to pretend anything to the contrary. It was useless anyhow. He had taken a leave of absence from school to follow her to Salzburg.

It was all he _could _do. Midori was the center of his life. The riches of her heart, of her affections, we entirely open to him, and they had been for as long as he could remember. She was so generous with her love and her care that he no longer felt he could live without it.

Against her love _patetico__, _her vivid, canorous heart, open only for him, his own attempts seemed dry and sparse, like old straw.

Himuro wanted to give her something that was worth having.

He unlocked the door to number four and held it open for her as she brushed past him, into the narrow hall.

As Midori untied her damp scarf, she tried to brighten the uneasy mood with lively nonsense chatter, something to put them both at ease.

"I've got to begin running in the mornings again if I want to keep in shape. It's the Kasspressknödle. I think I must have eaten a dozen of them, if I ate one. I just really love dumplings, I suppose," she offered airly, shrugging out of her wrap.

Himuro was unable to keep the trouble out of his face as he took her wrap from her and her stream of chatter died off as she fell silent, biting her lip.

They stared at one another, the wrap hanging forgotten in his hands, and at last she asked softly, "Are you angry with me, Reiichi?"

To this question, he could not remain silent.

"Of course I'm not angry with you," Himuro answered, his voice stormy with ill-concealed frustration. "I'm angry with myself. I'm angry with Sig. Gatti."

He turned away from her, as if to shield her from his unkempt and unseemly feelings, and threw her wrap gracelessly over the hat stand.

But she immediately came up behind him, laying her cheek against his back, her palms warm and flat against it. It was something less than an embrace. It was something he generally allowed.

"Don't be angry, Reiichi. I don't want you to be angry."

He wheeled to face her then, the heels of his shoes strangely loud against the stained wooden boards of the hallway, and he found her chin upturned, her teeth still pressed against her lower lip. The straps of her simple black evening dress stood out like lines of ink against her bare shoulders.

If someone had asked him later what it felt like to kiss her then, suddenly and without apology, one hand sliding down to the small of her back to draw her close to him, the other on her shoulder, with a thumb under the inky strap of her dress, he would not have been able to formulate a suitable reply.

It was not elegant. It was not lovely. He was not practiced.

It did not matter.

Her dress was left in a puddle near the outer door, along with his shoes, scuffed in their hasty removal by toe set against heel. Later, he would reflect that it had been so easy to divest her of her evening dress, it was as if she had not been wearing much of anything at all. At the time, he would have been displeased by the idea that Gatti had spent so much time watching her at the reception, but afterwards, he was not overly concerned.

If Himuro worried that Midori was uncertain about this development, he did not worry for long, because she was laughing as she danced backward over the threshold of the forbidden room and leapt with great enthusiasm onto the bed.

He had already shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it carelessly on the floor, but he had very little attention left for the further removal of his clothing, because his eyes were focused entirely on her back as her fingers tangled with the clasp on her girlishly simple black bra.

She was out of it before he had time to say anything, and then she cut off any hope of retreat into modesty by throwing it as hard as she could into the corner of the room.

Her head was bowed, and her face flushed rosily, and he watched her, completely entranced by the slow rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. He removed his necktie mechanically, like a soldier fieldstripping a rifle.

And then she looked up and smiled at him, and she was so entirely herself that he gave up what he was doing and crawled onto the bed after her. His hands found her skin, that strange, undiscovered country, and she began to wriggle her toes.

His bony, long-fingered hand traced a slow, deliberate line down the outer edge of her ribcage, and across the curve of her stomach. He dragged his fingers along her milk-white skin gravely, as if it were imperative that he memorize her intimate geography with precision and care, learning her with the worn grooves of his fingertips, toughened by their hard years of labor against ivory piano keys. Now that it had at last begun, it seemed inexorable, like the slow advance of a glacier through the green wildlands.

Midori squirmed a little from the combination of attention and anticipation, wriggling like an unruly puppy.

"_Sensei_," she let out her mixed feelings all in one breath: her childish playfulness, her willing ardor, her mild, delighted dread, "I appreciate your thoroughness, really I do, but it's very hard to keep still," she explained herself dizzily, yet affably. She was drunk on her own enthusiasm - drunk with relief - her joy entirely unfettered, just as it had been some few months ago in the music room at Habataki Gakuen, when he had delivered his brusque, awkward proposal.

He had become very still when she had spoken, his warm hands as hard as if they had been made of stone. He turned his face away from her, as if she had said something that was very difficult for him, but this time he did not withdraw, as he had done a hundred times, a thousand times, in the past. Instead, he was simply very still.

"Don't call me that," he spoke very quietly, his voice low.

"Aren't you?" she asked innocently, then answered herself without waiting for his reply, "You are. Of course you are. I imagine you'll always be teaching me something or another. Don't worry. I intend to teach you an awful lot of things too."

He was silent again, and she could not tell what he thought about her simple truth until he spoke, his voice carefully even. His face was still turned away from her, his lavender hair mussed and falling into his eyes. She couldn't read his expression.

"It makes me feel like I'm taking advantage of you," Himuro explained very slowly, as if each word were difficult to force through his teeth. He was fighting desperately against his fear, his uncertainty. He wanted to run from her, run as he had run so many times before, to retreat to a place where he was safe, where he had not yet done any terrible things. But greater than his fear was his yearning. He wanted to be with her, was desperate to be with her, was nearly mad with the want of it. And he was tired of being a coward, tired of being less than the man she deserved, so he had fought himself to a stark standstill and now hung over her, bloodied and bruised from the fight, quiet and wretched and desperate, and tried to explain himself.

At this she smiled again, and it was a wistful, painful smile that tumbled away as she stretched her neck and looked up at the figured tin ceiling. Midori laughed artlessly and helplessly, the way a child laughs, as she let her pale hands come to rest over his. "Himurochi," she chided, "I've been trying very hard to take advantage of _you _all this time. Only I didn't really want to so I always gave up halfway, because I what really wanted was for _you __to __kiss __me_ the way you did out in the hallway, for _you __to __hold __me_ the way you're holding me right now. I want you to take advantage of me _very __much_ right now. I suppose that's my vanity. I wanted to surrender to you, not have you surrender to me."

She paused thoughtfully, and then drew her hands away from his to let them carefully come to rest on the arms of his glasses, which she gently drew away from his face. The delicate motion, the brief touch of her fingertips on his face made him turn to look at her then, his sea green eyes electric, piercing and unmerciful. His mouth was a very thin line.

"I don't understand you," he said shortly, his brows drawn together.

"I think you do," Midori disagreed, shaking her head lightly as if to confirm this thought. "But you're trying awfully hard not to."

She had captured his gaze, and he would not look away from her, not now, not as they were, with his face hanging over hers, his hand frozen on the naked flesh of her stomach. She smiled at him then, familiar and sweet, the same way she had smiled at him for years now.

"Reiichi, I love you," she said simply, with no attempt at embroidery. "And I know that you know that I love you. I love you as you are. I've always loved you as you are. You don't have to try to be someone else. I love _you_," she paused, letting this weighty declaration sink in before she finished, gently, but deliberately, "_Sensei_."

He frowned, "You're just a girl. You're just a silly girl and you have no idea - "

"I'm the silly girl you want to marry," she reminded him glibly, "And I happen to have _plenty _of ideas, and I've had them for quite a while - "

"Midori - "

"You ought to have realized by now that I'm going to call you what I like, when I like, Reiichi - "

"_Midori_ - "

"The man I fell in love with is Himuro-_sensei_, and that means that sometimes - "

At last he could hold his temper no longer and out it came, crisp and sharp like snapping fingers, the tone of a practiced disciplinarian.

"_Yumeno_."

Her tirade stopped effortlessly, as if he had simply muted her, and the flush rose so quickly to her cheeks that even the tops of her small ears turned a beautiful and rosy shade of pink. She was utterly and completely felled. It was also impossible to ignore the fact that her nipples had flushed visibly against her fair skin. He tried not to stare at them and failed utterly.

"You have always been very difficult to handle," he confessed, as if lamenting this truth to himself. Himuro's terrible fear and shame had broken, and he was left only with familiar exasperation.

"I don't want anyone else to handle me," she volunteered meekly, having been thoroughly and quite surprisingly chastised. Ultimately, she was impossible to resist, with her rosy hair loose on the pillow and curling around her face, and her wide eyes, as warm as light through honey. She always had been. He hadn't known he had wanted such a thing when she first came to stand before him, but he had. He always had, from before the time either of them had been born, possibly.

"You can be at ease," he assured her, having at last found his footing again in this uncertain place. "I won't allow anyone else."

And then he kissed her as he had before, without apology and without restraint, and her mouth was warm and her tongue was maddening because she was anything but passive. He absently heard the clatter of his glasses as she lost possession of them, preferring instead to wrap her arms around his neck and pull him closer to her, one of her hands tangling in his lavender hair, which was now tousled beyond recognition.

He was, at the moment, not overly concerned with his personal appearance, having left his tie discarded on the floor of the bedroom, along with his shirt and jacket.

They drew apart at last, and he paused, heady and breathless himself, his hand flat against her stomach, his thumb playing over her navel.

He leaned close to her so he could breathe in her familiar animal scent and confessed his secrets against the soft flesh of her neck.

"I love you, Midori," he murmured slowly, quietly, with great deliberateness. "The world begins," he breathed in, "And ends," he breathed out, "With you."

Midori lay still under him for some moments, accepting this intoxicatingly serious declaration with complete abandon. Her soul was a sponge devoted to soaking up the potent and rarefied substance that was Himuro Reiichi's passion.

But then she was wriggling out from under him, enjoying the electrifying and impossibly new feeling of her skin accidentally, or perhaps not so very accidentally, brushing up against his as she squirmed around in his bed.

"Be still, you dreadful girl," he was chiding her, trying to catch her around her waist to haul her back into a more suitable position, because all her wriggling about had left her knee rather unapologetically in his face.

But Midori was busy with her own initiative, and she felt him tense up suddenly and freeze as he realized where her attentions lay.

He had nothing to say as she patiently undid his belt and then started to work on his trouser buttons.

This was an outcome that he was not yet mentally prepared to face in reality.

It was a curious sensation: numbness coupled with acute sensory perception. He was only vaguely aware of his surroundings, of the dim room, of the feeling of the quilt underneath him, of the sounds of the city outside. It was all very remote.

His universe was dominated by curious, thoughtful hands: the feeling of a thumbnail lightly dragged along the velvety length of - she had her hands on him, she had both of her hands on him, her fingertips slightly cool, and the path they traced was burned forever into the back of his brain, and then came a delicate, exploratory _tongue_.

"_Midori_," he panted, letting all his breath out at once as he struggled to sit up, pushing her knee out of his face and causing her to lose her balance.

Himuro sat panting like a pursued animal while Midori lay face first in his lap where she had fallen, with his penis pressed firmly against her cheek. After a moment of confusion she righted herself and then patted idly at the sticky smear he had left against her skin.

Himuro's own skin flushed and he felt the blood rush to his cheeks as he tried desperately to look at anything, anywhere, to think about anything but the glistening line on her cheek, near her ear.

He failed, utterly. It seemed like this was an evening rife with his failures. Midori might have disagreed and called them successes, but his mixture of mortification and fascination left him, at the moment, entirely uninterested in her opinion.

"_I__'__m __sorry__,"_ he began, and it came out short and contorted, as if he were barking at her, and he immediately regretted trying to say anything.

Midori was apparently utterly unperturbed by his antics, because she only briefly cast her eyes toward the ceiling tiles.

"Himurochi," she teased, "Do you really think that you're the only one who wants things? I didn't agree to marry you with the expectation that we'd spend our nights playing gin rummy and old maid."

Himuro had closed his eyes when she had begun to speak, his emotions a storm of dozens of sharp, broad desires all mixed together and crashing against one another.

"I've wanted to do this for as long as I can remember," she said, and although he couldn't see it, he could hear the impish smile curling up on her face as she basked in a particular memory. "Since the moment a tall, terrible man told me that I ought to straighten my scarf or face detention." She paused thoughtfully before continuing. "Every time you drove me home, every time you drove me _anywhere_, what I really wanted was to crawl across the console, into your lap and - "

But she found her honest recollections were interrupted, because he had let a hand come to rest lightly on her head, and was now tugging gently on her hair.

After that moment, their evening dissolved into an impossible streak of sensation that friction brought to a slow end only when they were both damp, feeble, and spent.

* * *

**Author's Afterword:** I'm always terribly late with Himurochi's birthday, so this time I resolved to be early. Happy birthday, Himurochi. I hope you like what I got for you.


End file.
